Big hitters give it some schtick

Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner in Meet The Fockers

Quite why this lazily written and directed comedy has achieved such success in America is the kind of puzzle no one can solve, except to say that maybe its starry cast and the memory of the same director's 2000 film, Meet The Parents, has wetted more appetites than it can justifiably satisfy.

Jay Roach's film looks like the kind of charade where big names let their hair down in spectacular fashion.

This time Greg and Pam (Ben Stiller and Teri Polo) travel with Pam's parents (Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner) to spend the weekend getting to know Greg's parents (Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand) before their wedding. They travel in the ex-CIA patriarch's huge and luxurious RV to Focker Isle, the Cocoanut Grove home that at once seems the exact opposite of everything he admires.

Mum, he discovers, is a sex therapist for the elderly, and Dad an ex-lawyer who has been a superannuated hippy house husband for years. What with the dog trying to rape the cat, Greg's foreskin, carefully preserved in a memory book, falling into the soup, and mother Focker getting caught in bed with her husband, both covered in cream, things go from bad to worse.

The worst is when Pam announces that she's pregnant at about the same time as the Focker's busty Cuban help divulges that she relieved Greg of his virginity years ago and now has a son by him.

You have to say that Ben Stiller doesn't overplay his comedic hand as male nurse Greg and that De Niro, though having to paddle his way through a drippingly sentimental and finally tasteless ending, does his about-to-explode schtick with some aplomb. And you also have to admit that Hoffman and Streisand play up and play the game for all they are worth.

But Roach's direction is basic, the screenplay is uneven and the whole thing looks as if everyone knows that subtlety is off the menu. It's funny in parts, but often blitzingly obvious. I'll be very surprised, however, if it doesn't repeat its American success over here. It doesn't always pay to be clever.